Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.
There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and...
The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce somet...
The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.
The foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly.
She nods, not meeting his gaze, and steps out into the evening. It is raining, of course. The umbrella now does what its owner has never been able to manage, and Miss Dark goes home.
Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!
Of always fighting against feeling useless. Of how sad it makes me feel that sisters won’t go to a midwife. Also, frankly, I’m sick of overprivileged, neurotic, crazy-ass . . . She stopped talking. Sh...
No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.
My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while t...
Meeting a namesake is one of the most delicate and most brief surprises.
Long life wore away everything that was not essential.
Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank—but that’s not the same thing. —Joseph Conrad
It's a sinking ship, he said. You ought to be grateful that they just threw you overboard.
I hate it that they even count errors,' Ethan said. . . . 'What kind of game is that? No other sport do they do that, Dad. There's no other sport where they put the errors on the freaking scoreboard f...
I had a lot of disasters in the kitchen, even during the long period when I was cooking under my mother's supervision and with the benefit of her experience. I still fail all the time, in particular w...
Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.
He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel.Just watch me, he said.
Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.
But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him...
